Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification, and Signification: A Thorough Study from Chinese Documents

I used this book in 1965 and the characters were crisp in that addition. You could see the progression of the characters. The smaller characters now are blurred. I hugged this book when I first received it, but the crispness is gone. I want traditional characters. The mainland Chinese who have been taught the simplified characters cannot even read classical writings from the 1950s. I will try to obtain an earlier version.

Really informative and easy to follow.

I purchased this as an e-book which was a big mistake as the chinese characters are so small you can't decipher them. Not recommended as an e-book.

I'm very happy to have purchased it! It's wonderful and very useful to help me understand and study Chinese language!

Really awesome book for hanzi/kanji/kanja nerds!

This is a reprint of an old text. That's ok. It uses only the traditional characters, because it predates the simplification of the character set, and that's ok too. But it is a photocopy of an old text, and the copy is awful. As result, the more complex characters are completely unreadable. I defy you to read any of the complex characters, like <<can / eat>> <<餐 in Chinese>>.

Font was practically unreadable. The book was not what I expected. I thought it would provide history of the characters and their evolution as symbols- sharing how their meaning expands to other applications and uses. The book is set up as a reference book of footnotes. It's not a reading book. It's a reference book. And the characters are not clear. The font is small, unclear and blurry.

Note that this is a (photocopy) reprint of a 1965 edition of a 1927 book. The font is almost illegible and the small print Chinese characters are for the most part either completely or partly blurred and unrecognizable. Only the very large ideograms are legible. The 1965 edition must have been an invaluable book for students of Chinese language and script, who, like me, were looking for a reference book that would help them remember the tracing and meaning of the Chinese characters by their etymology. For example, the character for king is 𤣩, is composed of 三, the number three (heaven, earth and humanity) and a vertical stroke, the man who holds these three powers together. This is exactly what this book provides, a complete history and categorization of the Chinese characters, probably the most complete work of this kind on the market.It's the kind of book that makes deciphering and learning Chinese characters highly enjoyable (that is if you can get the original 1965 edition)Unfortunately, with this 2016 edition part of the joy is ruined by the headache trying to read the font and making sense of the sentences despite the missing (blurred) characters.

This is a copy of a work as printed in 1927. The romanisation is of course Wade-Giles not pinyin. It was translated from the French by someone with an incomplete mastery of English and typeset with numerous uncorrected errors e.g. uunder, Shno-wen, and the Chinese characters for gong1 (kung 1) and fen1 (teal should be fen1) switched in the examples of radical 8. And there are small portions of untranslated Chinese characters. It is not suitable for reading on a Kindle as it is too large with no index, very few entries in the table of contents and unsearchable: the Kindle indexing handles only what it thinks are words (e.g. it will find ch or uan but not ch'uan) and in any case the romanisation has a space before the tone numbers. Searching is necessary because it has two lexicons. One starts at location 32212 and the other goes from 44428 to 62465.On the other hand it includes early (small seal script) versions of the characters and says what they represent.

Not a book to sit and read but a great book to dabble in. It is packed with information you will never really need but is extremely interesting.

Amazing details that open the Western eyes to the world ofthe Chinese culture through characters. An in depth study that makes learning exciting.The word 我 (meaning "I") reveals an unexpected concept of the ego.天 (meaning heaven )had deep significance for those ancient people.The book reveals the meaning of the combination of 日 月。This book will appeal also to the artistic mind.

El libro es útil, es una reimpresión de una edición antigua y sirve mucho para conectar los significados actuales y las definiciones modernas, ya sea chino...o en mi caso japonés, como no sé fonética de chino, cuesta trabajo trabajar con estos índices y la nomenclatura usada es WADE, que creo está ya en desuso. Pero ayuda mucho para hacer análisis filológico.Pero...la edición facsímil pierde MUCHA claridad, hay veces que en algunas páginas sólo se ve una mancha, cuando los kanji/hanzi son de muchos trazos es peor y no se puede ver con claridad, tiene algunas faltas de ortografía, ya que lo tradujeron del francés al inglés, pero ¿no sé por qué en 100 años nadie le ha hecho una revisión? sería de mucha utilidad que la editorial pensara en revisar esta versión y poder ponerla en versión digital.

Come riportano altre recensioni, il libro non è che un'edizione fotocopiata dell'originale e probabilmente adattata in un formato diverso dall'originale, il che rende la lettura particolarmente complicata e poco chiara.Tuttavia, per quanto riguarda il contenuto, esso è impeccabile. MI aspettavo un pinyin nella traslitterazione dei caratteri ma sembrerebbe piuttosto una trascrizione fonetica.In ogni caso presenta considerazioni molto interessati